Power Up: Lessons from Twelve Years of Organizing with Community Paralegals

This report will be released on Thursday, June 19th, 2025. Check back then!

Namati has worked for over a decade to live up to the ‘empowerment’ side of legal empowerment. The question has been: how do we provide legal support to people facing injustice and do so in a way that builds their power, both individually and collectively? The result has been a gradual evolution that has come through experimenting with new ways to do casework, stopping to reflect on our impacts, and infusing our training for staff and partners with an orientation towards building collective power.

This publication marks a 12-year journey that Namati continues to travel, distilling and sharing learnings from Namati staff, partners, organizers, and communities along the way. In these pages you will find a synthesis of insights drawn from over 90 interviews with people in Myanmar, Kenya, and India who were directly affected by an injustice and partnered with paralegals to address it.

In addition to capturing lessons from individual justice seekers, the publication presents two case studies from Namati teams in Mozambique and Kenya. The case studies distill lessons from efforts to build community-driven movements capable of addressing the root causes of injustice. Together, they demonstrate what community power looks like in action. The chapters that follow first define how the legal empowerment cycle can build community power, then offer practical insights and hard-won lessons from Namati’s 12-year journey.